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Buildings rise to environmental, artistic challenges

Frank Gehry condo project: The complex Frank Gehry has designed for David Mirvish’s King St. W. property includes three towers with undulating glass curves that move away from boring glass boxes.

Manitoba Hydro Place Head Office, Winnipeg: Generally considered the greenest building in Canada, this enlightened glass structurehas a double-wall system that guards against extreme weather, geothermal heating and cooling, displacement ventilation and a massive solar chimney that ventilates the building.

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban's cardboard structures, such as this 1994 exhibit, include a church he created in Kobe after that city was struck by an earthquake in 1995. The "temporary" church stood for 11 years.

Technology allows designers to do things now that would have been impossible just years ago. This doesn’t mean architecture will get better; but it has no excuses for not being interesting.

At the same time, however, climate change has imposed a new set of priorities on what we build. Questions about the appearance of space are now giving way to issues about the function of space.

The green imperative means there’s lots to be done. It turns out, for instance, that the countless hermetically sealed towers we have erected since the 1950s and ’60s can make people ill even as they spew vast quantities of pollution into the atmosphere. Indeed, buildings emit almost half of all greenhouse gases. By comparison, transportation is responsible for 27 per cent.

That’s why many older buildings are being remade to suit the needs of a more environmental agenda. A good example is the Toronto-Dominion Centre. Designed by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, this city’s single most significant piece of modernist architecture. Last May, the T-D Centre’s owners, Cadillac-Fairview, launched an ambitious $110-million revitalization program aimed at making the centre’s biggest tower more energy efficient. Plans include replacing 5,676 windows and installing low-consumption energy equipment.

This move toward highrise sustainability is one that’s unfolding in cities around the world. Interestingly, as these decades-old towers are renewed, they are also being recognized as heritage structures. Though Torontonians have never loved the T-D Centre, which has now been designated, they are increasingly aware of its architectural significance. This adds to the expense of enhanced sustainability efforts. To Cadillac Fairview’s credit, they have ensured that the new windows will match the dark glass used in the original towers.

Another trend sweeping the architectural world is also focused on towers; in this case we’re talking about the growing interest in the skyscraper as sculpture. The boring box is, well, boring and architects everywhere are trying to find ways to give it life and movement. Look at or the Marilyn Monroe (Absolute) condo towers designed by the Chinese architectural firm, MAD, for a site at Burnhamthorpe Rd. and Hurontario St., in Mississauga.

These highrises, and those by other architects, explore various ways of bringing a sense of motion to the exteriors of their skyscrapers. The straight lines, flat exteriors and right angles of traditional architectural geometry have been replaced by curves and undulating surfaces that change with every perspective.

At the same time, in cities like Toronto where the proliferation of towers has changed the skyline, we see a trend towards towers that are growing thinner and thinner. The idea behind these “point” towers is that they are narrow enough to allow sunlight to penetrate into the city and keep the surroundings from being cast in permanent shadow. Because these tall, thin structures sit atop podiums that are typically three to six storeys high, they can also be set back from the sidewalk, which means they are less likely to loom over the street.

Many of these new towers are clad in glass and steel. One need look no farther than the downtown core of Toronto to see how our love of transparency has acquired new architectural currency. The desire to bring outdoors indoors, to let the sunlight in — to own a piece of the sky, as one ad puts it — goes back millennia. Modern construction technology has allowed architects to take things to a whole different level. The glass tower — residential, institutional and commercial — is the new standard.

Developers love them because they’re relatively cheap to build. At the same time, engineers worry these structures are disasters waiting to happen. They are concerned that the low insulation quality of glass will mean that these towers will become ruinously expensive to heat and to cool as the price of fuel rises. They also say that the double-glazed windows deteriorate in time and become useless.

On the other hand, there’s the example of the Manitoba Hydro Head Office in Winnipeg. Generally considered the greenest building in Canada, this enlightened structure is clad entirely in glass. But it has a double-wall system that guards against extreme weather as well as a number of features such as geothermal heating and cooling, displacement ventilation and a massive solar chimney that ventilates the building.

In an age focused on the need to reuse and recycle, it’s not surprising that another architectural trend is toward buildings comprised of materials such as shipping containers, tires, wooden palettes and even paper. These projects tend to be small and individual; often they are someone’s home, demonstration projects or a response to an emergency.

The most notable practitioner of this sort of architecture is Japanese practitioner Shigeru Ban. In Kobe, Japan, he designed a church of cardboard tubing after that city was struck by a devastating earthquake in 1995. Though intended as a temporary structure, the building stood for 11 years when it had to be moved because of a storm.

More recently, Ban designed a cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, after the city’s 19th-century cathedral was also destroyed by an earthquake. The new structure, which opened last April, seems as beloved by parishioners as the church in Kobe.

As Ban observed, “Even if a building is made of paper, if people love it, it can become permanent.”

Keeping in mind that even so-called permanent buildings are no longer expected to last more than 50 years, the trend to temporary architecture is clearly one that’s here to stay.

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